described? Josephine begged, pleaded, cajoled, wept, waxed piteously and
finally fainted. When she came to, she once more denied everything
hysterically, threatened suicide and offered him a divorce if he did not
believe her. Napoleon affected to be impressed. It is absurd to imagine, as
some naive biographers do, that he actually believed her. What he wanted
from Josephine was external submission, deference and respect and what
he feared most of all was a public scandal that would dent his reputation.
He knew very well that she was continuing her affair with Charles, but
for the reasons already adduced he enjoyed participating in his own secret
humiliation - a masochistic urge made even more piquant by the quasi
sadistic way he would toy with Josephine and break her down. Napoleon
actually cared more about the potential scandal from the Army
provisioning by the corrupt Bodin company, but here Josephine
successfully enlisted Barras to cover her tracks and obfuscate the record.
A letter from Josephine to Charles on I9 March, the day after the
dramatic showdown with Napoleon, is eloquent: 'Please tell Bodin to say
that he does not know me, that it was not through me that he obtained
the Army of Italy contract.'
Disillusioned with both Directory and Josephine, Napoleon departed
on 8 February r798 for a two-week tour of inspection of the Channel
ports, travelling incognito from port to port through Normandy, Picardy,
the Pas-de-Calais and Belgium, but concentrating on Boulogne, Calais
and Dunkirk. In Belgium his itinerary took him to Nieuport, Ostend,
Antwerp, Ghent, and Brussels. In Antwerp he conceived a great plan for
rebuilding the port installations, which he actually put in hand many
years later. But his idea for taking his gunboats from Flushing to Dunkirk
and Ostend by canal, thus avoiding the risk of British attack on the open
sea, was foiled a little later by a British commando raid, when r,zoo crack
troops destroyed the sluices of the Bruges canal and many of the
gunboats. The one positive achievement was that Napoleon followed in
the footsteps of previous commanders of the French 'Army of England'
by concluding that Boulogne was a better launching point for an invasion
than Calais.
Although invasion preparations were reasonably well along in all the
ports, Napoleon did not like what he saw. He had no confidence in the
ability of his unwieldy flotilla to run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy. In
his heart he still believed in the traditional French military thinking that
an invasion of England was possible only after a victory at sea. Even if it
were possible, he reasoned, for small vessels to cross the Channel under
cover of darkness, this could be done only in the winter when the nights
were long, since the estimated time for a crossing was eight hours
marcin
(Marcin)
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